DIONYSUS (Διόνυσος, Διόνυσος). — Greek divinity: “the god of ecstasy and terror, of frenzy and exhilarating intoxication, the mad god whose appearance drives men mad.”
Scholars disagree concerning the location of his homeland. Once Thrace has been excluded, after the etymology of the name of D. proposed by Kretschmer had proved invalid—an etymology that constituted the principal element of the theory—and Phrygia and Lydia, or both together, have been set aside, especially in view of the improbability of being correct in regarding Semele, the mother of D., as a goddess of the Phrygian or Thraco-Phrygian earth (here too the etymological arguments, among others, have proved insubstantial), it does not seem audacious to consider Greece itself as the place of origin (according to Thucydides [2, 15, 4], the Anthesteria already belonged to the Ionians before their migration). There the cult of the god, whom Homer already knows perfectly well, although showing toward him the same reserve as toward Demeter, derives its origins from the lower classes of the population and thus, perhaps, from the pre-Aryan stratum. But Greek or non-Greek, what matters is that, as soon as literary and figurative monuments begin to speak, D. and everything proper to him are expressed in a distinctly Greek form, and that at a certain mo-
ment, “whatever was greatest and most beautiful, from the spiritual and aesthetic point of view, that classical Hellas produced, it produced through the influence and under the seal of D.” From him, as F. Nietzsche demonstrated, tragedy derives its origin (τραγῶδαι, from the τράγοι, as the actors in the theatrical performance were called: cf. M. P. Nilsson, Der Ursprung der Tragödie, in N. Jahrb. f. Klass. Alt., 27 [1911], pp. 609 ff., 673 ff., 687).
The same uncertainty that prevails regarding the origin of the god seizes anyone who wishes to reduce the figure of D. to unity—he was called πολυειδής καὶ πολύμορφος by Plutarch—and to determine his precise role in myth and worship. The activity of D. is practically unlimited, and to confine him to one sphere rather than another means only losing the significance of his figure and betraying what the Greeks thought of him. D. and the Dionysian spirit flow everywhere throughout the spiritual and material worlds; mysteriously, he stands at the roots of being, encompasses in his nature everything proper to being, is being itself, a paradoxical synthesis of opposites in which finite and infinite, distinct and indistinct, plunge and disappear. D. is equally present and absent, near and far, exultant and afflicted; he appears as one who gives and as one who takes life, as belonging to this world and to the hereafter, and in his myths, “just as in the purest art and the purest poetry,” the possible and the impossible, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual are mingled. Without the need for any particular exegesis, by listening to his mythologems and examining the cultic practices that are their practical reflections, it is not difficult to grasp the innermost essence of D.
He is the son of a god (Zeus) and of the Theban Semele (Iliad, XIV, 323), who, a mortal woman, gives birth to an immortal son (Hesiod, Theog., 940 ff.): D. χάριμα βροτοΐων (Iliad, XIV, 325). Because the mother wished to see her husband “in all his celestial splendor,” she is burned by his thunderbolt: Zeus takes the immature fetus, sews it into his flank, and brings it to birth after carrying it to maturity (Pindar, frg. 85; Herodotus, II, 146; Euripides, Bacch., 94 ff., etc.). D. himself will then descend to the Underworld to bring his mother to the heaven of the Olympians: Semele will later receive divine honors in Greece (cf. Plutarch, Quaest. gr., 12, p. 293 C; Hesiod, Theog., 942). The duality of the god’s nature, already established in the myth of his birth from a mortal and an immortal, is revealed even more clearly in the god’s “epiphany”: the mask is proper to D., though normally foreign to the Olympians (there were masks only in the cult of Artemis Orthia), and it is a symbol of a dual personality. The contradiction persists in the fact that D. is associated with bringing unrestrained joy, the tumult with which he impetuously takes possession, in a word, orgiasm, but also the terror and silence of death. The epithet Βρόμιος (cf., for example, Aeschylus, Eumen. 24; Pindar, frg. 75) indicates his characteristic noisiness; Euripides (Bacch., 141) reveals the joy and the need to dance that seize the mother Semele herself when she carries him in her womb, while Pausanias (VI, 26, 1), Diodorus (3, 66), Pliny (Nat. hist., 2, 31), and others speak of the prodigies recorded at his appearance. Characteristic of his taking possession is also the symbolic marriage of the image of D. with the wife of the archon basileus in Athens, which took place during the Anthesteria (cf. Aristotle, Athen. pol., 3, 5). The basilinna, assisted by fourteen attendants (γεραραι), secretly offered sacrifice in the temple of D. ἐν λίμνις, and in the evening lay with the statue of the god in the βουκόλιον of the archon basileus. Many myths also speak of the ruin that coincides with the appearance of the god (thus, for example, Iliad, VI, 132 ff.; Apollodorus, 3, 37; Plutarch, Quaest. gr., 38). And just as D. in his benevolent aspect is called Λύσιος, Λυαῖος, in his harmful aspect he bears the epithets Ἀνθρωπορραΐστης, Ὡμάδιος; his terror spreads especially among women who, covered with the bassara or the nebris, form his retinue (maenads, bacchants, thyiads), and induces them to tear apart their children or the young animals they had shortly before suckled. This phenomenon is the ὠμοφηλία:
DIONYSIUS, RUSTICUS AND ELEUTHERIUS, saints — The martyrdom of St. D. and his companions. Miniature from the missal and pontifical of Etienne Loypeau, bishop of Luçon (late fourteenth century) — Bayeux, Chapter Library, ms. 61, f. 50v.
in the ἐνθουσιασμός or ἕκστασις the Dionysian procession feeds on the flesh of animals just killed. Perhaps this practice concealed the idea of a sacrifice, through which one intended to incorporate the spirit of the god enclosed in the body of the sacrificial animal. In the plant world, the power of D. is revealed in the life of certain plants: the vine, ivy, pine, and fig tree. Ivy has a double flowering (it too may be said to have been “born twice”), and the whirling formation of wine, its power to weigh down the body and liberate the spirit, accords well with the contradictory figure of D., who binds and loosens. The pine, which, like ivy, flowers in winter and whose resin is used to preserve wine; the fig tree (D. Σικίτης), from whose wood the phalli sacred to the cult of D. are carved. And, in general, he protected, as lord of πάσης ὑγρᾶς φύσεως (Plutarch, Is. Os., 35), all flowering (D. Ἄνθιος, Εὐάνθης, Ἀνθεύς).
Indeed, he is also master of the watery element (“the element in which the primordial secret of all life dwells”), the element which, like the god, possesses both a clear and joyful nature and a dangerous and deadly one: outside the sea, he is summoned by the Argives to his festival (Plutarch, ibid.); on a boat-shaped chariot he arrives at the Anthesteria; in the sea he takes refuge to escape an enemy (Iliad, VI, 130 ff.), and many other myths reveal his belonging to the
waters: hence the names Πελάγιος, Ἀκταῖος, Λυμαῖος, Λυμαγενής. In the humid element, over which D. presides, lies the creative force (cf. Augustine, Cio. Dei, 7, 21), which is expressed most clearly by the phallus (D. Φαλλήν, and phallic processions were held in honour of the god) and by the bull (D. Βουγενής). But if generation resides in humidity, water is also a feminine element (« aqua femina », Varro, Ling. lat., 5, 61), and D. is always surrounded by a retinue of women. « Nymphs nourish and raise D. as a child and accompany the adult god » (cf. Homeric Hymn, 26), and « nurses » is the name given to the participants in his dances (τιθῆναι, Iliad, VI, 132): D. himself has something feminine in his nature (ὁ γῆναι: Aeschylus, frg. 61; cf. Euripides, Bacch., 353; Arnobius, 6, 12; Firmicus Maternus, De err., 6, 7), something that leads him to pour out his love—an entirely feminine love, in the manner of Paris—upon Ariadne, which consequently links him to the Minoan world, and which has a nature similar to his own, similar, in its contradictions, to the entire world surrounding D.: a world of life and death, just as D. himself is life and death. For D. dies (at Delphi his tomb was also shown), as appears in the myth of D.-Zagreus, in which the god is torn apart by the Titans no differently from his sacrificial victims: the kids and fawns in the arms of the maenads. The connection with the waters also accounts for the mantic motifs attributed to D., who, in union with Apollo, gave the sanctuary of D. the system of divination by inspiration (v. DELFINO, ORACOLO di).
MYSTERIES OF D. - The cult of D. also had a mystery organization (v. MYSTERIES). This aspect, too, which evokes mystical motifs, attests to the great antiquity of the god. It is known that D. was invoked in the Lenaean Agons (cf. scholium on Aristophanes, Frogs, 479: καλεῖτε θεὸν said the priest, to which those gathered responded Σεμελή: Ἰακχέ πλουτοδότα), by order of the daduco, one of the priests of the Eleusinian mysteries (v. ETERUSIANI, MYSTERIES). In this case, then, D. would belong to the mysterious cult of Demeter, and his rite consisted of dramatic representations. Elsewhere, too, for example, at Lerna in the Argolid (cf. Pausanias, 2, 30, 2), at Sicyon (id., 2, 11, 3), at Patras (id., 7, 19 ff.), there is evidence of a mystery cult of D., whether in connection with Demeter or not. Countless, then, are the private mystery cults, especially of the Roman era, in which the figure of D. is involved: among them, the Bacchanalia.
Outside these festivities, the god assumes a central role in Orphism (v. OFITI, MYSTERIES), whose theology and asceticism will play such a significant part in Greek philosophical speculation, exerting its influence especially on Plato.